 Okay, thanks everyone for joining us for this year and we'll be watching this on YouTube both now and later to watch. My name is Joey Webstrand. I'm a British Academy post-doctorate fellow at SOAS University of London and pleased to have us in our webinar today, Dr. Nick Kelfman, Nick is the reader in sign languages and deaf studies at the University of Central Lancashire. I always pronounce British place names with a bit of trepidation because I'm never sure how they're actually pronounced. He's also co-director of the Island's Institute for Sign Language and Deaf Studies. I presented twice at conferences where Nick is also presenting. First one was about two years ago, but at that time I was recovering from a foot injury and it wasn't very mobile and misexplicitation. So I was fortunate that earlier this year, at the beginning of this year, we were again presenting at the same conference and that's when I finally got to see a bit of what Nick's work actually looks like and it was really interesting to see what he's been doing and what we can all learn through the work that he's been doing and so I was excited to have opportunity to hear more from you today. Nick's work fits in pretty well with a lot of things we're interested in at SOAS also. Obviously SOAS has been very involved in language documentation for a long time and so the work Nick does documenting Indonesian Sign Language is interesting both for the content of the corpus he makes but also for the methodology the users may be coming from that and of course SOAS has also been interested in Indonesia for a long time as well. It's a place where you can learn Indonesian as part of your degree, perhaps the only university in Indonesia where that happens, I'm not sure if there's any other university teaching Indonesian and of course we have people studying all aspects of Indonesian culture and society and so seeing what Nick can bring in terms of new aspects of Indonesian society is also interesting to us. So we're interested to hear about what you've been doing and learn from your work. I'll just remind everyone in case you missed it in the presentation that Nick will be presenting in British Sign Language and we're very fortunate that Sarah will be here interpreting for those of us who don't know BSL so the language interpretation. Nick will speak for about 40 or 45 minutes then we'll save some time at the end of this hour together for questions. If any questions come to mind during a while we'll listen to this talk you can put that into the chat or if you're watching on YouTube you can make a comment on YouTube video but then at the end of the presentation I'll try to get to as many of your questions as we have time for at the end. With that being said thank you so much Nick for joining us and we look forward to hearing from what you have to share today. Thank you very much. Can I just check? Yeah can everybody see me okay? Just checking the interpreter can see me as well so thank you very much Joey for that introduction. I'm really delighted to be here today presenting this afternoon and really I've been doing this work for 10 years with the deaf community and deaf friends in Indonesia so I've been gathering this corpus in sign language in Indonesia for a period of time so I was thinking how best to represent that and show you the work the extensive work that I've been doing over this period of time and I thought the best way would be to pick five clips which is why it's entitled as it is today the corpus in five clips but first of all just a little brief introduction I know Joey has given a little bit of an introduction and explained that I'm from the Islands Institute and that was set up in 2007 and that was really to look at research in international communities deaf communities but also we wanted to look at the impact as well it was it was useful to look at the research that we were doing and also the impact that that was having so we were looking at India and Indonesia so we established Poupet which you can hopefully see on that slide there and that was with an aim to really doing lots of research work it was established in 2014 with a colleague of mine called Muhammad and the three aims you can see there it was really to do some sign language research and sign language teaching and look at the teaching capacity and improve that capacity and also try to improve literacy in Indonesia for deaf children so really this presentation I was talking to Muhammad I was discussing it with Muhammad beforehand and he has actually recorded his various views and opinions which I've managed to capture so I would like to introduce Muhammad to you and I will incorporate those throughout the powerpoint I try to actually incorporate them within the powerpoint but there seem to be some kind of software breakdown so what I'm going to have to do is to switch between powerpoint and showing you the video footage through some of the means so please all start praying now but this video is going to work as it should whilst I get the first clip of Muhammad to show to you so he can introduce himself to you so my name is Muhammad and this is my sign name I'm from Solo in central Java I remember that Nick and I first met in 2009 and at that time Nick was a volunteer with the SO we talked and I found out that he's from England then Nick came back to Indonesia as a researcher looking at sign language varieties in different Indonesian cities he was filming people signing and I saw this I was interested and decided to join his projects so hopefully that all runs smoothly and you could see that all okay and there'll be more from Muhammad later throughout this presentation but I think it's important that we have this awareness of Bicindo first so I introduced Bicindo to you so Bicindo was developed you know we don't really know exactly when and we've tried to look for evidence but there's no records as such as to when it was introduced but we know that the first death school was established in the 1930s so that means that we have knowledge that at that time there were deaf children who were educated together do we know if the teacher used sign language no we don't but we do know that socially or maybe you know in dormitories or in other non-formal settings sign language was developing and it's possible that it was around before then as well we just don't know so the name Bicindo was given to the language in 2000s by an organisation called Gurkatin and it's the Indonesian Association for the Welfare of the Death and they gave Bicindo its name and so the name was actually given many years later after the language had already been developed but there are some questions linked with language delineation so was it one sign language were there many different sign languages at that time so the Bicindo corpus all together there were 131 signers from six different regions in Indonesia and you can see there the photos of the people who were involved we have dyads triads and tetrads and and it was free conversations that we were eliciting that free conversation from people and sometimes if there was no appropriate partner or interlocutor the researcher would actually lend a hand and be part of that conversation and elicit the natural conversation from another interlocutor so all together there's nine hours of corpus of natural conversation of signed conversation so all together there are 46,091 signs that you can see within that corpus so now we're trying to find working on a lexical database similar to a dictionary if you like which means that each sign will have its own gloss its own name will be put against that sign and that's obviously a huge piece of work and it's not easy so we're you know we're working on that but it's at a slow pace obviously because it's an enormous piece of work so you can see there with the you can see with the corpus the sample stratification if we can see by gender there were people from different places and also there were people of different ages you can see there as well I think there's I've got the slide up there but I just wanted to show you this the six different areas because this is really important for for the corpus itself for people to know so we've got Padang, Pontinaq, Solo, Makassar, Singara and Bon with the six areas we went to elicit that data okay so there were two stages of doing this so first of all we went to Solo and Makassar and that was 2010 to 2015 and that was at the period of time that we collected the data and then the second stage was 2016 to 2019 from Anbonne, Pontinaq, Singara and Padang so yeah and I must say a huge thank you to the funders as well and the Levinshum Trust and CBM huge thank you to them if I hadn't had that funding then this would not have been possible so it's important to acknowledge their part in this as well so the six geographical regions we we chose because we wanted to represent Indonesia and we wanted to represent these different geographical areas we didn't want to just focus on one specific area maybe you know Indonesia is a huge vast country of many many islands and there's a huge difference in terms of culture in terms of religion and many people's spoken language is actually very different as well so it was very important to recognize that and in doing that find a balance and elicit the data from an array of different places which is why we chose those six areas and it was linked with you know most people I had met people from those places before so there were people I knew but I want to go back a little bit to the table so I'll just go back there because you can see the age ranges the categories the groupings that we have there the four groupings so you can see that most of them are over a 10-year period but the early group if you like the oldest of the groups they spawn a 30-year period and so older people though it was there were very few and it was very hard to find those older people and those older sign language users to be part of the corpus and so now I'm going to bring Mohammed back again and he's going to talk about why it was hard to find some of these older sign language users and he'll also talk about our experience of looking for deaf people to participate in this you know in city areas it was quite easy but in more rural parts it was more difficult so I'll hand over to Mohammed to explain that to you and then Mohammed will talk about some of these different regions and what his experience of when he met people whether he could understand them or whether there was any miscommunication or communication difficulties okay so there's a few different clips here from Mohammed but first I was helping to find deaf people we wanted to recruit signers of different ages to take part but it wasn't easy to find older signers we had to go and find them because they didn't want to come to the place where we'd been doing the filming so we had to ask around and find out where they lived and then ask them if they wanted to take part in the filming and notice the difference in how easy it was to communicate with some older signers because when they were young there were no deaf schools so I felt there was more variation among the older signers that we met when we went to Pontinec the deaf community was very well networked some friends sent an sms round and the deaf people gathered together in one place for filming it was the same in Padang and in Singara there was a place where deaf people came together but in Ambon things were quite different the deaf people didn't seem together and we had quite a search on our hands to find people tried to use a snowball method sometimes we were told that there was a deaf person in a certain place but there was no one there and Bonn has had no local deaf association which might help to explain this we had to travel to places that were far away up in the hills very far away nowhere close by at all my experience of communicating with people in these cities was that many of their signs were the same as mine if someone used a sign I didn't know I would ask what it meant but in general their dialects were intelligible to me okay thank you to Sarah there I think the text was coming up quite fast so um so I want to explain a little bit about the background of the corpus as well um so now it's time to dive into it and have a look at these clips as I promised as I would represent the corpus in these five clips I'm aware that maybe you are aware of the background of sign language linguistics well maybe not so much um so I'll just you know go through a little bit to help you understand this certainly at a superficial level um so I want to start talking about manual alphabets um most of the world of sign language has manual alphabets and maybe you maybe when you were younger maybe you learned some of your own manual alphabet and I think many people use the the manual alphabet and it's their first contact with sign language through the alphabet in Indonesian sign language it's quite interesting because the manual alphabet there isn't just one but there are two so there's basindo alphabet and there's also the asl alphabet so if we go about this two-handed basindo on one-handed which is the asl so basindo alphabet I believe it was introduced by the Dutch by a Dutch teacher or Dutch teachers but because we've found some similarities with the alphabet in the Netherlands and also in Germany as well so I think the teachers thought we need a way when they were over there in Indonesia whenever it was to teach literacy and they they introduced the alphabet to Indonesia and then the asl alphabet was introduced in the 1980s and that was from America and then it became incorporated by the government they they established a dictionary and they used Siby and I'll just explain what Siby is it's completely different to basindo it was created really through a committee and it follows the Indonesian spoken language grammar so it follows the same order of grammar used in spoken Indonesian and the alphabet really gained popularity and spread throughout Indonesia the asl alphabet but if you can just have a look at this slide you've got the six different places there and you can see in the blue which is basindo the basindo manual alphabet and you've got the orange which is asl the asl manual alphabet and I checked the corpus to look at how many for each of the different regions the six regions we're using basindo and asl so you can see that's represented in the graph there and it's it's quite impactful I think this slide because it shows you the variety because in in Makasal there's a lot of basindo and in Anbon you've got a huge amount of asl and the reason for that I think is linked to education primarily but also for Anbon some people will know there was a war a civil war in Anbon and at that time it had an impact on the deaf community some people fled the region and Muhammad said that the deaf people there didn't really have any kind of organization any community and so the language transmission if you like was broken so I think that's why there's a strength of asl and the influence of asl is even more marked in Anbon from young people who have not learned basindo from the older community members and I think that's why there's such a stark difference there so altogether you know in terms of how many signs there are based on the manual alphabet there's 4.5 percent of signs based on the manual alphabet some hearing people think sign language is the same as the manual alphabet it's exactly the same and it's really not and so that's just one small part of this work and the manual alphabet is used in lots of different ways there's lots of different strategies if you like which are represented on this slide it could be the full word finger spelling the full word it could be fingers it could be spelling the first letter of the word so for example BSL Monday is M that this is the BSL for Monday which is M initialization and then the third way it could be to spell you know using two or three letters and taking those from the words and I'll give you an example of that later or the fourth way could be using I've called it initialization using a hand shape of a letter from a particular sign so an example of that would be from American sign language the sign for family if you can see here if I use the F shape that's family that's the sign for family but you can change the F to an S and it becomes society the S you could change to a T and it becomes team so you can see family society and team so you can see that's all through using the same location and using the same hand movements with different different hand shapes and it's the initialization using that particular initialization to convey that so drumroll please we have our first clip so finally you may be thinking and this is a person from Padang and at that time of filming I think she this lady was in her early 70s and so first of all I will show you the clip and I won't tell you what it means I'll just show you first of all it's very brief so twice she signs this and it's quite interesting for me because the first time I saw the clip I thought I don't understand that I don't really know what she's saying and the same with Muhammad who's a native Indonesian sign language user and then later we watched it again and we realized the meaning of it so I'll show you again and then I'll explain what it means so Ibu Ibu is mother mother and she's using this Ibu Ibu and it's from three letters I be you I be and you but over time those three letters have changed to this movement and they've morphed into this this one movement so and but it actually means I be you Ibu from the word mother and this process is called nativization and maybe you know if you're doing research into spoken languages you'll know it well a word could be borrowed from a particular language and then nativized into a spoken language because it and it's changed in that in that way so if you think about Indonesian spoken language the word for computer has been taken and the pronunciation has been taken to match the phonetics of the Indonesian spoken alphabet spoken language so it's the same process with sign language sign language has its own phonetics and that's linked with the for example hand movement and sound shape and the three letters I be you I be and you it doesn't really match sign language phonology very well so you can see that this process has taken place of nativization and it's a similar process that happens for other words as well for example for milk and for teacher and bankrupt so it's the same process so if you take the teacher the Indonesian for teacher the written word guru G U R U and it's become this so that's everything G U R U incorporated into that sign so it's been nativized and Padang also there's a tendency to pick three letters two or three letters from a word so for example word the word year is signed like this so TM or the word Sunday like this M and G and I want to have a look at the different age groups at this point and I've talked about the four different strategies for using the manual alphabet and if you look now the oldest group here use many of those different ways that I've shown you you know they'll use the two or three letters you can see the red there is quite dominant but then the younger group of sign language uses you can see that's very there's a negligible amount very tiny amount of using that particular strategy compared with initialization which is much stronger there are many that are using initialization and you can see that in the light blue at the final bar on that graph so what do I think is happening well there's been the introduction of ASL the ASL manual alphabet was introduced and I think in some way that thwarted the growth of those the two-handed Bacindo alphabet but it's possible that there'll be a change back to using Bacindo because now people have become more aware of what's going on and in terms of their history that they have this two-handed alphabet then ASL infiltrated and they may well say well we don't want ASL we want to go back to using Bacindo so it'd be quite interesting to observe what will happen over the coming years okay so we'll move on now to the second clip and so it's important for you to know that in terms of sign language you use hand shapes you can use orientation location and movement to convey meaning so I was doing a study on completions so that was in solo and also Makassar and I found four different forms for completed particles but also it's it's possible to show mouthings as well to use to express the completion using of mouthings from the Indonesian spoken word so I'll now show you the four forms of the completed particles so if you see this is one two three and four so there are four different completed particles so now I'll show you the second clip and this is from Makassar and it's important that you know in sign language there are various different articulators that you can use at the same time simultaneously so I was checking the corpus to try and find a really good example of this of completives and I found this particular example I think this is really interesting so I want to ask if you can pick up how many different articulators there are how many times the completives are used and if you can pick up what's happening so it's just to give you a little bit of background she's talking about her brothers and her sisters have they been on pilgrimage to the Hajj pilgrimage or have they not yet been so she's talking about which of the siblings have or have not been so I'll just let you view that clip I think maybe I'll show you again it's quite fast so maybe you've captured um there are three different articulators that she's using at the same time so on a left hand she's saying she's counting she's saying these siblings um the brothers and sisters the first the oldest the second the third and so on she's going in order of age and then this that she's doing is showing the pilgrimage the pilgrimage she's showing that expressing that on her head and then she's mouthing the Indonesian word as well for finished suda suda already done so at the same time there's three um in one if you like and I think that's this is absolutely fascinating so I'll show you one more time I think that's it's just amazing how much information is crammed in to this you know short clip at the same amount of time the coordination of using her right hand left hand the movement that she's doing around her head and also um that articulation on the mouth as well the mouthing is amazing I'm going to go straight on to clip three now um because the topic's the same we're talking about completives so um this clip if you have a look at the mouthings there are different variations of mouthings to um to convey that something has been completed and there's also different uh variation apparent so I will show this clip so have a look just watch it um and you'll see when those signs are cropping up some are being used very very quickly um over and again so um that clip there uh there's two good friends from Indonesia having that chat and they're talking about um a family someone getting married and how many times they they say it in that clip is 13 times and it's 22 seconds in total so you know there's real kind of persistence there first time I saw it I was absolutely gobsmacked I was amazed and I thought this is fascinating and it shows that variation so well um and maybe you're surprised how many times it's shown but I need to inform you um you know in terms of Indonesian culture the use of not yet or finished is really important um and many questions so have you eaten finished or have you eaten not yet married finished or married not yet so you have to remember uh though those questions you know it's finished not yet finished not yet that's very much part of Indonesian language and if you have a look at the two interlocutors there and which variation they're using um you can see there that's captured just on that slide so you can see on the right um is mainly using the second variant and on the left he's using mainly the first variant so also there's twice twice there's mildings in there as well um plus one time there's a fourth variant as well so I was really interested to research this and look at persistence um so in terms of variation I wanted to understand a little bit more so for example uh you know I got the corpus and um I found that 58 percent of the time they're using the same variant um so they exhibit persistence and if the if the other variants there are some switching some changes and that could be to match the other person the other interlocutor but that's rarely actually occurring that's only happening in 9 percent of the corpus 9 percent of the time so we don't know if that's just accommodation um are they accommodating are they trying to match the person or is it something else okay so I hope um you're all with me so far and now we're going to plow straight ahead to the fourth clip so the fourth clip is linked with gesture and um the research shows that um speech gesture um the speech justice gesture system um is used so emblems um become fixed and they become conventionalized within particular region for example so maybe you know in Indonesia I'll ask you um this gesture what do you think this means in Indonesia the gesture if you are Indonesian yourself or if you know Indonesian um you will know that this means mad or crazy um so in English you know maybe an English person or a British person would see that and think oh means something different means I don't know not sure and so they wouldn't necessarily understand that so speech gestures can be linked with a place um and if you don't believe me go to Italy because there are many many co-speech gestures that are evident in Italy there are so many there so these are really short little um clips I'm going to show you um three negative particles and I want you to have a look at these three and try to decide which you think which are from Indonesian co-speech gesture okay so have a look so the first one the yellow one the green one and the purple one okay so I'll let you have a look again at that so the first one the yellow that's this um movement the green one and the purple one okay so which do you feel which one is from spoken gesture Indonesian spoken gesture well is I've been a little bit cheeky really because it's not just one there's actually two of them that are derived from Indonesian co-speech so do you think it's if you was thinking the yellow and the purple you'd be correct it's the yellow and the purple um they are co-speech gestures from Indonesian um so are they from Indonesia um you know this this handshake here this this movement the yellow one the purple one is used in some areas but not all areas whereas the yellow one is used throughout Indonesia so you can see the prevalence of the um negations negative existence is there um throughout those six locations that I mentioned I was studying so purples only use actually in three different places and then there's one area you can see there in sangara where um they're using all three varieties and I want to show you a clip here of this um and you know there are lots of um there are the person is displaying negatives um and trying to explain uh negatives but is using um those different variants that I've just explained to you so you can see she's using this variant um and she's saying I don't have it for not allowed for um doesn't matter so she's using the same for three those three different occasions to convey those three different meanings and I was thinking why some areas have some of the negations and some don't uh why they're not prevalent in some places and I think it's linked with the history um of Hinduism and how Hinduism has spread from India because this sign is used in India and it's from Indian sign language and it's also used in Cambodia as well um and possibly in other locations as well in other countries um and in some areas of Indonesia it's very strong that use um so I think it's linked very much with that because deaf people will see something visual some gestural movement and it will be incorporated into the sign language okay we're approaching the fifth clip now so the fifth clip's a little bit different um I at the end I asked people who had been involved in the research and I asked them and I said how do you feel about the research documentation where we've done so I was a little bit surprised with their responses but also pleased with their responses um so I'll show you the clip and also Muhammad has some extra thoughts that he adds um linked with the impact of this research and the corpus and how it's benefited him personally and also that through our research we've been trying to look at that um benefits and you know giving that benefit back to the deaf community in Indonesia and making it a benefit for them so I'll show those clips now in sequence so you can see what people have to say so Sarah um the interpreter a big breath ready to um articulate what's what's being said here okay so how do you feel about the documentation work we've done with the question delighted really good I liked it I'm very happy I like using Elan it's the first time I've used it here in solo we never knew about Elan before it's good to know about it I'm happy the lady I was glad to have the chance to learn some new words remember when we were transcribing the data in Elan for me it was good to be able to look at signing in depth for example there might be a sign that I find confusing but with Elan we could look at the sentence again more slowly and then it made sense at a deeper level my experiences in the field have been very useful for me I've been exposed to so many different variants and different ways of signing things from men and women older signers younger signers different styles and ways of using the sign space I learned such a lot now I interpret on one of the television news channels I've met so many signers with different strengths so as I interpret I have this in mind and I try to sign as visually as I can in a way that they might understand without the experience that I've had I would just give it my best shot but having seen how people sign in the corpus I'm more aware of what they might understand research on research on Basindo is so important this becomes part of how we convince other people about our language they always ask do you have any research any data the research that we've done in different regions helps to shed light on our language Basindo I remember in Macassar we stayed with Ibu Ramya she had a shop selling donuts and many deaf people came to the shop we realized it was an opportunity I had experience of running a deaf organization so I gave a presentation to share knowledge with them and encourage them to be honest we know how important it is to support the deaf communities in the places where we have been doing our research but we are aware of the challenges the distance is involved but also the challenges of keeping in touch and there has been quite a bit of miscommunication as we try to communicate by SNS so that's a lot of information to throw at you all lots of thought-provoking information and they were talking about Ilan in those clips the data and that's the software we used for documentation the documentation of the sign language and it had a huge impact on them because it was the first time they were able to watch things slowly and go back and it really provoked a lot of thoughts about the sign language and Mohammed and Mohammed talked about Macassar before as well about trying to share that knowledge and trying to share his experience as well and linked with deaf organizations and developing but also we're talking about the challenges and those challenges for example of you know Indonesia is so vast you've got all these different islands and places so the challenges are there in terms of geography but there are some different activities that we we did so we organized two people from each of the six places that we went to we organized some training and some research linked with linguistics these workshops that we held and we had we had a university in Jakarta and it was the Akmagaya University in Jakarta so you can see here this is where we went to the library we had a look around we did some research we thought about that research and thought about why it was important and then we looked at the data in Ilan and everything that we'd been able to capture to do that research and the university lecturers we invited as well to come from those six different areas so they were also able to be part of looking at that Ilan data so that's my presentation finished and my presentation through five clips I hope it's given you some idea of what I've been doing over these these years and the research that I've identified through this I'd like to say thank you very much to Joey Love-Strand for inviting me here to deliver this presentation and it's also really important to thank the Indonesian deaf community and the people who've been such a health such as Mohammed and lots of other people as well who've been involved in helping me along the way and I'd also like to thank you all as well for participating in this I have an email here on that last slide you're more than welcome to contact me with any questions but now hopefully we can have a discussion and a question and answer session so I invite questions from you all thank you very much thank you very much Nick that was great very good to see more of your work and to hear from the Indonesians you've been working with about what they think we have a few questions already so some here in zoom and there is one on the YouTube so let me go to Lily Anne's question here in the chat just looking at Lily Anne's first entered question together she asked is besindo or ASL taught in schools and related to that what's the Indonesian government commitment towards Indonesian Sign Language so thank you Lily Anne for that question that first question just to let you know most schools in Indonesia are oral so the teachers don't use any sign language at all so that's why you know the teachers themselves don't really have any opportunity for training for any sign language acquisition and knowledge and some schools have a dictionary which is government provided so there's a signing system which is provided from the government they've got that dictionary and maybe some teachers will try to copy some of the signs from that dictionary but you know most deaf children in Indonesia don't have experience of any kind of education there's no access really to that so it's very hard to understand they find it very hard to understand what the teacher's saying so if the child is in a mainstream setting or maybe inclusive school maybe it's deemed an inclusive school it's very very difficult for them to understand or maybe there's a deaf child that lives in a very rural setting so they don't necessarily go to school because the parents don't know where to send this deaf child maybe they don't have that awareness and they think the child has a mental health problem or a learning difficulty and they're labeled stupid or you know and they might be embarrassed they might not want them to go out into public so I know of one school that uses besindo one school that used besindo some have strong sibu which I was talking about before which was the government sign system sibi sorry is that does that answer your question does that kind of cover everything that you were hoping to find out Lily answers thank you so I think that's the second question I can see there that's popped up you know besindo really you know new signs are created all the time because obviously you have new technology and technology moves on things are invented iPads phones apps are invented so for example so Instagram for example Instagram the sign is this Instagram Instagram because it's the I the I letter G and it's from the American and I and G and then this because maybe because you use photos so it's that camera motion which is captured within the sign for Instagram so you can see you have partly iconic signs but also based very much on finger spelling as well with the handshape so that's one way that new signs are created but are they always linked with finger spelling absolutely not no there are very many different ways that signs are created the third question I'm just looking at this the Indonesian government the attitude of the Indonesian government towards besindo and I think for many years the Indonesian government just didn't have that awareness that they have besindo and they didn't have that awareness that it had its own grammar its own lexicon its own lexical dictionary and so on but recently they've become more aware and there's one law which is now besindo and cb and both are enshrined in the law so it means now that there's this slow kind of awareness this developing awareness within the Indonesian government that they have this besindo and it's been there for a long time so I'm hoping that they will support it in the years to come and maybe some of you know that the Indonesian government the most important thing in the in the government is language and literacy and so on and that is the the number one so if we can convince the government of that that deaf children can learn and they have that capacity to learn the language through besindo I think that would be a breakthrough and I think that would create the success that we need so are there any more questions so I just pasted one in the chat yeah from YouTube if you want to look at that one yeah yes so I can see that yeah I'll read it just for everyone else to so talking about completions and mildings of completions um but just asking about gesture as well to show completion so my response to that is I've not really noticed anything mouthing gesture wise I'll just explain the difference for clarification so you've got mouthings which is based on the spoken language or the spoken word so for example I showed you before suda suda being finished already and the mouthing gesture is a little bit different for completion um that's only in sign language it's not it's not from the spoken language like pa or bu bu or pa or fi which you can see on my mouth there but there's no link there with the written or spoken language it's it's sign language's own gesture mouthing gesture so I know I've not actually talked about this yet but in Bali you've got a different sign language there's one village that has its own sign language which is broken away from besindo um completely separate to besindo and that sign language has mouthing gesture and they're very clear mouthing gestures linked with completions and they show completions I think pa pa is um is the completion so there may be other signs as well or ba and that shows whatever it is has been completed has completed I don't know if that person if you have noticed anything yourself because I know you do research yourself in this particular field so maybe this is an area you have knowledge of yourself maybe we can take one last question the question from Suzanne in the chat she's asking about the mention of transmission of sign language in ambon that was interrupted by the civil war the question is does this relate to different grammatical structures in the version of variety in ambon in the sense of prealization over a second language acquisition phenomenon that simplifying grammatical structures is such a good question I know Suzanne Suzanne I know well and she loves creole and she's you know we've had many dialogues over the years talking about spoken language and sign language and creole so are you talking about the effect of the war and the effect on the structure I mean to be honest with you I don't really know I think a lot more research is required in that field because I know in terms of language transmission it has been affected in ambon so older deaf people fled young deaf people had no contact with the older with the elders in their deaf community so I think it meant that maybe young sign language users were more influenced by their education and I have seen that before as well because you know the contact I've had had with different people in Indonesia so you know they might be using a structure that's more simple or not I don't know it's difficult to say but I think more research is needed they might be using something that's more similar to Indonesian spoken language someone's asked a question about what exactly is SIBI SIBI and I'll just explain that just to respond to that question because I hope by now you've realised that the sign language grammar and spoken language grammar are completely different completely different but SIBI is one example of a group of it's a sign system it's not a sign language it's a sign system with the aim of taking the grammar of the spoken language the dominant spoken language and adding signs so it means that it doesn't have the order of a natural sign language it doesn't use space it doesn't use facial expressions it has one sign for every morpheme so in the written language so it means really actually it's very difficult to use because sign language has its own way of very cleverly showing things you know so like I said before that that example it was showing three simultaneous bits of information you know people have all sorts of ingenious ways of expressing things beautifully in a very natural way and if you tried to do that with SIBI using a sign system and having different signs for each morpheme it would become very heavy and impossible to sign and also you wouldn't have the speed that you have in a natural sign language so there are others as well other signing systems that have been created by hearing people by governments by teachers which means you know the linguistic rights there's an issue over the linguistics or linguistic rights though so I very much believe in strongly respecting the the rights of the deaf person and of their own natural beautiful visual languages and Indonesia has been trying to use this SIBI system for many years I think almost 30 years now and they've failed it's just not being established it's not being used by deaf children it's not being used in literacy many other means thank you so much Nick I think we're a bit over our time so we'll end there but thank you to you first for the work you're doing and thanks to all of your collaborators for giving us this insight into what's happening in the division sign language thank you also to Sarah for being with us today we really appreciate making this presentation possible for all of us to understand and follow thanks to everyone who came and joined those who asked questions and those who learned again we hope we'll have more opportunities to hear from Nick in the future thank you very much thanks everyone thank you thanks very much I just want to add a thank you to the interpreter as well thank you